«If you’ve seen the “Shift Happens” bumper sticker, you’ve seen what our culture has made of one of the central ideas in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 50 years ago. For the marketers and boosters of personal transformation who casually talk about paradigm shifts, the phrase designates not just a gestalt switch that casts things in a new light, but a world so insubstantial that it can be thoroughly transformed by a single idea. Tomorrow there may be another paradigm shift, and another after that. There is thus no real progress, just a new bubble as good as the old bubble. This is of course not what Kuhn intended us to learn. Kuhn wanted to free us from the illusion that knowledge is independent of history and of the sociality that marks us as humans, but he did not think that all beliefs that our history and sociality put before us are equally worthy. Indeed, he quickly moved away from the “shift happens” conception of paradigms as bundles of beliefs…»